With the tagline of "Fix my Community!" this Kenyan initiative allows citizens from its own country, as well from Uganda and Mozambique, to report local and regional issues via SMS and the web that ought to be of government concern. Problems brought up by Huduma users include broken water-pipes in slums, teaching misconduct in schools, intransigence in the court system and lapses in local policing.

With a bulging youth population and millions of internet users, young, tech-savvy citizens are the target audience of BudgIT in Nigeria, where d. Decades of corruption and mismanagement in Africa's largest oil producer have seen billions of petrodollars disappear each year. BudgIT attempts to shine a light into the financial black hole and improve transparency by making government statistics readily available and understandable.

Aiming to make the finer details of Nigerian law accessible to all, this project has made the country's constitution available in app form, with features such as a search function, legal directory and user forum. Its makers have distributed the app across a variety of platforms including Android, Blackberry, Nokia's Ovi Store as well as Java for older phones. Perhaps as a result of its compatibility with a wide range of devices, since its release in 2011, the app has had 80,000 downloads.

This web app enables Ugandan students to hold their lecturers and universities to account by reporting any incidents of corruption or poor performance. Both individuals and institutions are given an overall rating out of five from an average of scores in various different categories such as efficiency, fairness and attendance. Students can then see a list of those who have been ranked the worst and the best across the whole country. Aside from being judged on academic merit, university staff can also be reported for more serious issues such as soliciting students.

A user-friendly knowledge bank of health related information, MedAfrica enables citizens to check a doctor's credentials, locate a nearby hospital, consult a first-aid manual and look up the properties of administered drugs. Such is the success of the app's debut in Kenya – downloads are reported to

have been running at 1,000 a day – that its makers, Shimba Technologies, are planning to roll it out across the whole continent. One of the app's most notable features is the ability to diagnose oneself through an interactive diagram of the human body that allows users to narrow down symptoms by selecting afflicted areas.